The Rev. Canon Dr. Brett Cane, March 28, 2010
Palm Sunday: 8:30 a.m. & 10:00 a.m., Liturgy of the Palms/Palm Procession & H. Communion
Learning to Love #6: “Vulnerability”
Matthew 27:1-54
The Collect for Palm Sunday:
Almighty and everliving God, in tender love for all our human race you sent your Son our Saviour Jesus Christ to take our flesh and suffer death upon a cruel cross. May we follow the example of his great humility, and share in the glory of his resurrection; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who is alive and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Introduction
The place of this sermon has been moved from where it normally comes and set at the juncture between the enthusiastic welcome of Jesus as king and the Scriptural drama of his journey to the cross which follows. In it I am going to unfold for you as best I can the significance and meaning of Christ’s death for us from the perspective of the vulnerability of God’s love.
This Lent, we have been looking at “Learning to Love.” In the first three sermons we saw how we humans experience and express love through security, intimacy and commitment. In these last three we have been looking at how God loves. We have seen that his love for us is limitless and risks rejection and now, in this final sermon, we will see that it is also vulnerable – love is costly to God. We will first look at whether we can talk about God feeling pain at all, then, at what happened on the cross, and finally, how we can exercise vulnerable love.
Does God Feel?
First, we need to look at the whole concept of God being vulnerable and feeling hurt – is this possible? For a long period of Christian history, the idea that God can feel pain was thought of as heretical – the official term was patripassianism – the Father suffers. People were worried that if God suffered it would mean he experiences change and this would diminish his changeless character. There were also concerns that it didn’t allow for enough distinction between the persons within the Trinity. But I believe the main reason behind the objection to God suffering is more rooted in non-Christian ideas such as ancient Greek views of God as detached from human suffering and pain. Gnosticism depicted God in the same light and this led the apocryphal Gospel of Barnabas and traditional Islam to deny that Jesus died on the cross and that he was replaced by Judas. “Muslims dispute the fact of Jesus’ crucifixion, arguing that Allah would never have dishonoured His prophet by allowing Him to undergo such a death. Muslims believe that Jesus was miraculously caught up into heavenJudas Iscariot) surreptitiously took His place on the cross.”[1] People have found it hard to acknowledge a God involved in our suffering and pain. and that someone (perhaps
But this is not the God of the Bible. First, we can look at Jesus himself. We know of his love and compassion, of course, such as when he took the little children in his arms (Mark 10:16), treated the woman caught in adultery with respect (John 8:1-11), and his reaction to the rich young ruler trying to prove himself: “Jesus looked at him and loved him” (Mark 10:21). He also expressed grief – Jesus wept at Lazarus’ tomb (John 11:35) and over Jerusalem (Luke 19:41) and in the Garden of Gethsemane: “He took Peter and the two sons of Zebedee along with him, and he began to be sorrowful and troubled” (Matthew 26:37). He also certainly experienced and expressed anger at those who had twisted true religion and used it to their own ends. There is the well-known episode of Jesus’ cleansing the temple: “Jesus entered the temple courts and drove out all who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves. ‘It is written,’ he said to them, “‘My house will be called a house of prayer,’ but you are making it ‘a den of robbers.’” (Matthew 21:12-13). The place he cleansed was the only location non-Jews could come and pray and it had been turned into a religiously-sanctioned market. People’s exclusion made him angry. Jesus experienced and displayed many emotions – he was not detached, but vulnerable.
The other two members of the Trinity are also described as being vulnerable. The Holy Spirit can be grieved: “And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God” (Ephesians 4:30). God the Father is shown to be full of love and compassion towards us in spite of us causing him pain. In Hosea, he speaks with compassion to Israel as his faithless bride – “Therefore I am now going to allure her; I will lead her into the wilderness and speak tenderly to her…I will betroth you to me forever; I will betroth you in righteousness and justice, in love and compassion” (Hosea 2:14, 19). Jesus gives a similar picture of the Father in the parable of the Prodigal Son: “But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him” (Luke 15:20). God the Father gets angry, too: “Do not worship any other god, for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, I am jealous God” (Exodus 34:14).
Some people get upset at this but we need to note that frustration and anger at bad behaviour can reveal love to one desperately seeking it. W. H. Vanstone illustrates this through a story told by a woman who was a foster mother or “Auntie” to many children:
It was when N. was about twelve years old that I heard one evening that he had been stealing. Long before he came home I had heard the whole story and was satisfied that what I had heard was true: so when he came I was waiting at the door for him. I took him by the scruff of the neck, and I threw him into the garden, saying, ‘We will have no thieves in this house’. I left him in the garden a long time; and then, when I opened the door and he came in for bed, I kicked him up the stairs. In the morning N. was very chastened and very quiet: but at last he came to me and asked shyly, ‘Auntie, after what happened last night, do you still love me?’ So of course I said to him, ‘Do I still love you? But, N., of course I love you. If I did not love you, do you think that you would have made me so angry?[2]
Vanstone comments, “The boy’s power to make ‘Auntie’ angry was the mark or proof of her love for him. It was also the gift of her love.”[3] Anger was a demonstration of love.
But there is more. Vanstone continues, “The boy’s power was rooted not in some quality or capacity of his own, but simply in the fact that he was loved…Where love is authentic, the lover gives to the object of his love a certain power over himself.”[4] This power is what makes for vulnerability. God gave us this power over him when he created the universe and humans apart from himself and thus allowed for rejection and being hurt. Love is only authentic when the lover has the capacity to feel and be affected. “Do I matter to you?” is the question we ask to one another and to God – it means, “Do I make a difference to you, do I affect you?” God says a resounding, “Yes!” Therefore God is deeply vulnerable. It is on the cross where this love and vulnerability was most clearly put into action.
What Happened on the Cross?
But what really happened at the cross? The nature of God’s love has been distorted by sincere but unhelpful attempts to explain what happened there. When Jesus cried, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me” (Matthew 27:46) many have assumed that it was because God, who is too pure to encounter sin, turned his face away from Jesus at that moment. This assumption is behind the line in the popular hymn we sing, “How Deep the Father’s Love”[5] by Stuart Townend:
How deep the Father’s love for us
How vast beyond all measure
That He would give His only Son
To make a wretch His treasure
How great the pain of searing loss
The Father turns His face away
As wounds which mar the chosen One
Bring many sons to glory
This opens up the danger of separating the Father and the Son in the action of the cross and denying the true nature of the Trinity. It also misrepresents the character of God the Father. If God the Father wasn’t involved in the cross then what he did was to send someone else to do the “dirty work” and he appears aloof, wrathful and harsh. Jesus can handle sin but the Father can’t. The Father isn’t vulnerable, therefore he isn’t loving. I can come to Jesus but not the Father. This is not so; the Biblical view is that “God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself” (2 Corinthians 5:19, KJV). The whole of God was involved on the cross.
So why did Jesus cry out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” First, it is direct quotation from Psalm 22, verse 1, which we read on Good Friday because it is a description and prophecy of the crucifixion. Jesus was pointing us to the psalm (he couldn’t recite all of it, of course, because he was hanging in agony!) so we could see the whole picture. There, the cry of dereliction at the beginning leads on to affirmations of God’s deliverance and resurrection – “I will declare your name to my people…he has not despised or disdained the suffering of the afflicted one; he has not hidden his face from him (this shows God did not “turn his face away”) but has listened to his cry for help” (Psalm 22:22, 24). Second, it shows that Jesus was really suffering and experiencing the vulnerability and agony of love. What was happening was that God as Trinity was taking on all our rebellion and literally allowing himself to be torn apart by the brokenness that is really ours. But the vulnerable love within God was big enough to swallow all that brokenness. The hell that is rightfully ours he suffered and experienced within himself as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. On the cross, God in Christ paid the cost of our rejection of his love, cancelled the power of sin over us and removed the barrier between us.
Wayne Jacobsen in our Lenten book, He Loves Me! has a very helpful analogy of what happened on the cross: [6]
What if you had a young child who was diagnosed with a rare blood disease? As the doctors tell you about it, they tell you that the disease is almost unheard of in children. Though they have a form of chemotherapy that could cleanse your child’s blood and restore him to health, the drug is too strong for the child’s undeveloped body to withstand the dose necessary to cure him. In other words, the cure would kill him before it healed him.
But there is a way around that, they say. They could transplant his blood into your own. You would then contract the disease and they could administer the chemotherapy into your blood. Though it would make you excruciatingly ill and eventually kill you, the therapy would produce antigens in your blood that could then be transplanted to your child’s body and cleanse him of his disease. Would you do it? Most parents wouldn’t hesitate for a second.
Neither did God. This was his opportunity to destroy the power of sin and liberate those who had been captives to it all their lives. The onlookers at Golgotha that day only saw a man experiencing the agonizing death of crucifixion. They did not know that the sinless one had been made into sin for them and that the physical pains of the cross only reflected in human terms what transpired in God’s eternity.
It seems that the cup of wrath was lifted to his lips and Jesus drank of it fully, letting it eat away at sin itself. He drank it to the end, letting wrath war against sin until sin succumbed to the power of God and was consumed in him.
This is what was happening on the cross – God’s love was making himself totally vulnerable and in so doing, defeated sin and its power over us.
How Can We Love Vulnerably?
We will close by looking at how we can love vulnerably. First, we need to return back to our first sermon and look at our security. The temptation to doubt God’s love is rooted deeply in our souls. Receive his word of affirmation – “You are my child, whom I love; with you I am well-pleased” (Luke 3:22). When you allow yourself to be grafted into Christ through faith you open yourself up to receive God’s vulnerable love and begin to see sin and its power and deception defeated within you. As you grow in your intimacy with God you then begin to have a new power to love others. As you rely on God for your primary affirmation and not others, you can begin to love them for who they are and not for what they give you.
Second, we need to recognize that our love for others will also lead to our vulnerability and possible rejection. As we live out our calling as God’s bride that will involve our identification with him in his suffering. The Scriptures are clear that disciples are called to “Deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me (Jesus). For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me (Jesus) and for the gospel will save it” (Mark 8:34-35). It is suffering love which will win the world – this is Jesus’ way, the challenge to the Churches in the book of Revelation and the testimony of Christian history.
Finally, you can not love in your own strength. As you open yourself up to being more loving and thus more vulnerable you can not carry the pain yourself. After experiencing pain or anger as a result of loving another, share it with the Lord. At end of each day – give the Lord the frustration and hurt you have encountered that day and ask him to fill you afresh with his vulnerable and life-giving love. He has already taken your pain to the cross; leave it there. And to the cross, we now will turn.
Almighty God, whose Son was crucified yet entered into glory, may we, walking in the way of the cross, find it is for us the way of life, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
[1] Found on http://www.christiananswers.net/q-aiia/islam-cross.html; the website argues that this interpretation could be a misunderstanding of the Qur’an but it is the common one.
[2] W. H. Vanstone, Love’s Endeavour, Love’s Expense. (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1977), pg. 51.
[3] Ibid..
[4] Ibid..
[5] Stuart Townend
[6] Wayne Jacobsen, He Loves Me! (Newbury Park, CA: Windblown Media, 2007), pgs. 135-136.
